Linda Gregerson, from “De Magnete”

It was during the siege of Lucera
     that Petrus Peregrinus (Peter
the Pilgrim), builder of catapults, layer
of mines, chief engineer and servant
     to Charles the servant of God,
conducted in his leisure hours behind
     the fortifications whose
erection he himself had lately overseen
     experiments on the lodestone.
From his letter "On the Magnet" (August
     8, 1269), a world
of usefulness and chiefly as to method, only
     later named and codified. "My dearest
friend," he wrote. The scorching wind.
     The city not yet fallen. Soon.

From Magnetic North, which also includes the long poem “Bicameral.” Gregerson will be taking part in the “Reading Between A & B” series next month with C. Dale Young and John Gallaher. Here’s a preview of what she might sound like: “Narrow Flame,” which she read last month to an Atlanta audience.

16 April 2007 | poetry |

Lesley Dormen’s Favorite Linked Stories

When I first obtained a copy of Lesley Dormen’s collection of linked short stories, The Best Place to Be, I realized that although I’ve been inviting short story writers to pay tribute to their own favorite authors for a while now, I’d never addressed this particular branch of the genre. Well, I thought, here’s a great place to start—and Lesley had plenty of ideas on how to do it!

I’d been reading and loving “linked story” collections long before I wrote one myself—in fact, long before the thing itself (novel? story collection?) had even been named. Like other readers of a certain age, I discovered John Updike’s sophisticated, neurotic, ambivalent Everycouple, Joan and Richard Maple, in the early 1970s, in The New Yorker. Updike had been writing stories about the Maples since 1956; eventually, all thirteen were collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. These exquisite explorations of young marriage (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”), middle marriage (“Giving Blood”), broken marriage (“Twin Beds in Rome”) and divorce (“Separating”) were thrilling to come upon one at a time. Collected in one volume, the Maples stories are collected glimpses of 1960s marriage, allowing a reader to drop in and out of one couple’s intimate life through their experiences of parenthood, infidelity, and divorce, while preserving a unique time and place, all refracted through that Updikean narrative dazzle.

The extraordinary first sentence of “Twin Beds in Rome” is carved into my brain, probably forever: “The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come.” I see myself in my tiny apartment on West Eleventh Street (one block away from where the Maples themselves once lived!), puffing at a cigarette and pecking away at my Smith-Corona, trying to replicate the amazing confidence, rhythm, psychological complexity and surprise of that one sentence. These were the first stories that captured my heart as a young female reader new to New York City, to Greenwich Village, to her own life. They were the first stories that taught me to read as a writer.

(more…)

15 April 2007 | selling shorts |